Jim Campbell is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and was pastor of two Presbyterian churches in the southwestern side of Detroit, then became executive director of the Detroit Industrial Mission. Published by the Detroit Industrial Mission, 1970. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Chapter 1: The Meaning of Action

Action is a favorite American word. "No more talk -- we want
action!" is a sentiment as acceptable as apple pie. Political leaders,
clergy, community militants -- all exhort us to get where the action is.
"The South End" -- controversial student publication at Wayne State
University -- denounces as hypocrites those would-be revolutionaries who spend
their time taking dope instead of preparing for action. But what exactly does
action mean?

Arendt deals with this question in The Human Condition. In it she
analyzes what to her are the three primary activities of man: labor, work, and
action. Her understanding of action comes through most clearly in contrast to
the other two. Labor. to Arendt, is that activity carried out in rhythm with
nature, as in farming or feeding a household. Its goal is to maintain life --
to exist, it is cyclical; what is produced is immediately consumed and the
process begins all over again. Labor is akin to the biological process itself

Work looks beyond immediate consumption It is manís effort at permanence and
durability in a sense, an attempt at immortality -- something beyond the limits
of the biological process and the rhythms of nature. Work is the activity of
man the craftsman the maker of things, creating a stable and durable world for
himself and his posterity: a table, a city, a painting, a car. It is the human
activity we have glorified most in our western civilization.

Both labor and work have to do with things, with the materials of nature or nature
herself. Both can be carried on by solitary individuals -- the farmer in the
field, the carpenter in his shop, the scientist in his laboratory.

In Arendtís view action is different. It is the activity not of man but of
men. it requires other people. It is the only human activity that goes on
directly between men without the go-betweens of things or matter. Its material
is the web of human relationships of which weíre all a part. Action is carried
out by the words or deeds of men among men. The condition for action is
plurality. The chief characteristic of action is that it is the beginning of
something new, the starting of a process or a chain of events rather than the
making of a product. Birth is human action in a most fundamental sense -- it is
the beginning of someone new, a totally unique person, although in giving birth
the mother labors in an equally fundamental sense.

All three activities are present. for instance in the life of an automobile
plant. I was an assembly-line employee for several years, and there, despite
the presence of hundreds, even thousands of other people, I could be as
solitary as a peasant in a field or a herdsman tending sheep, laboring in
rhythm -- not with nature, to be sure -- but with the conveyor belt that
brought the auto body or its parts to me. I was a laborer, not a worker in
Arendtís sense. There were those in the plant who worked, that is,
created a product from an image in their minds. And there was action, when
someone would begin something new in the human relationships of the plant
community, would speak a word to stir trust or distrust, or issue a memo that
raised or lowered the morale of others. I discovered the presence of action
particularly when I became a union steward and began to take part in the public
affairs of the plant, experiencing the risk of public words and deeds and
feeling the consequent praise or blame of my peers.

Action is exposing yourself, showing your hand. It means leaving the privacy
ot your solitary labors, moving beyond those expected
work relationships in which the product is always the go-between, and saying or
doing something about the human affairs -- the public realm -- of that
organization or community of which you are a part. Itís rocking the boat of
human relationships for good or ill. There is risk, uncertainty, and a note of
pathos in action, thus in part the I donít-want-to-get-involved syndrome in
most of us.

Arendt pin-points this uncertainty in two further characteristics she
assigns to action: unpredictability and irreversibility. We donít know
ultimately what the results of our words and deeds will be and we canít take
them back once spoken or done. How often we say, "I wish I hadnít done..
." or, "If only I could take back what I said." Action is the
sorcererís apprentice calling into being a magic broom to carry water and
ending with a flood in his masterís mansion.

When we became involved as "advisors" in Viet Nam in the early
1950ís who could predict the present situation? And who could take it back and
start over? Involvement has escalated relentlessly until, thousands of violent
deaths later, we are essentially debating how to stop the stupid spiral of
events we started.í

The American Revolution, in the view of many, was one of the noblest
collective actions in human history. But one crucial part of that action,
unforeseen at the time, plagues us to this day. In order to assure the
participation of the southern colonies, slavery was not abolished in the
constitution. The terrible contradiction between the revolutionary affirmation
"all men are created equal" and the subjugation of black people has
been with us ever since. Belief in black inferiority -- the rationalization
concocted to explain the contradiction -- will be with us even longer. The
actions of the nationís founders were unpredictable and irreversible. (My
examples.)

It is no wonder that men fear action, that despair and cynicism so easily
make inroads in our minds and we flee to hobbies or bury ourselves in the
routine necessities of existence. We have the freedom and the capacity for
action, but we donít know what will result from our public words and deeds and
we canít stop them once theyíre out.

Is the final meaning of action then uncertainty? Perhaps even futility? The
remedy to futility, in Arendtís view, is in the nature of action itself. Any
chain of actions can be broken or altered by new action -- a new beginning. Men
rebel against necessity or fatal denouements. France leaves Viet Nam, gives up
Algeria. The Czechs begin a ripple in the Russian "Empire" that may
yet become a tide. The cry of "Black Power" arises while white
America dabbles with integration. But such new directions are uncertain too.
How do we bear the uncertainty? To Arendt we would not be able to except for
two capacities -- themselves forms of action -- written deep in the nature of
man: the capacity to promise and the capacity to forgive.

Promise redeems unpredictability. By covenants, contracts, agreements.
treaties, we create islands of stability in an uncertain sea. Consider marriage.
In launching that venture, to apply a line from Whittier, "we know not
what the future hath of marvel or surprise." But the man and woman say,
"And I do promise and covenant before God and these witnesses, to be your
loving and faithful husband (wife); in plenty and in want; in joy and in
sorrow; in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live." And a
new beginning is made, full of risk and unpredictability.

Forgiveness redeems irreversibility. It is itself an action, creating a new
situation. It is the release of another from the consequences of his action; it
releases the one wronged from the necessity of revenge. Revenge is cyclical and
predictable; forgjveness is not -- it is a miracle.
It is the best human antidote to the irreversibility of action. We might find
many examples of forgiveness operating in Arendtís sense in individual
relationships. But examples seem less likely in inter-group relations or
international relations, either of forgiveness or of its antecedent repentance.
But perhaps that is because neither goes under its own name or gets labeled as
such. No nation or street gang says, "We repent" or "We
forgive," But regrets are sent and accepted. Apologies are made, hidden in
the face-saving rhetoric of diplomacy, and then the reply comes, possibly as a
gloat, but carrying within it the willingness to let the other begin a new
tack. Or forgiveness and promise combine in a treaty or a contract in which the
parties acknowledge past misunderstandings and wrongs and mutually pledge to
move beyond them. When this happens the irreversibility of past actions is
checked, the slate is momentarily wiped clean, and men are able to act -- to
begin a new thing.

As laborers, then, we are bound to the cycle of biological life, laboring
and consuming in rhythm with nature. As workers we pursue the semblance of
immortality, building a durable world that will outlast our individual lives.
In action we seek by our public words and deeds to influence and shape the web
of human relationships that connects us all. No activity of man is so
potentially dangerous or rewarding, nor so uniquely human.

Action can bring us glory or mockery. Therein is its pathos and our
ambivalence. We shout "action" as a shibboleth, applaud it in others,
and shun it for ourselves. We want a say in our destinies, we want to influence
the machine, the system, but we avoid beginning any new thing, fearful of the
uncertainty and danger it entails and the public or organizational commitment
it demands, preferring instead the more charted activities of labor and work.

Arendt feels and expresses this pathos which always characterizes action.
But what bothers her more is the seeming convergence of events and forces today
that threaten to remove even the possibility of actions for instance, the
increasing powerlessness felt by people whose lives are caught up in large
bureaucracy, the pent-up rage of oppressed peoples, the breakdown of political
structures, or the development of scientific knowledge and techniques far
beyond not only the comprehension of the public but beyond the participation
and control of government. At many points she is pessimistic about manís
future. But despair is not the last word for her. She concludes a key chapter
in The Human Condition with this affirmation:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its
normal, "natural" ruin is ultimately the fact of natality,
In which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words,
the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by
virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon
human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human
existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of
faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among
the evils of illusion in Pandoraís box. It is this faith in and hope for the
world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the
few words with which the Gospels announced their "glad tidings":
"A child has been born unto us. (The Human Condition, University of
Chicago Press, 1958, p.247)